1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of forwarding a mail in an electronic mailing system, and particularly to a method of designating a destination to which one of received mails should be forwarded.
2. Description of the Related Art
The electronic mailing system is available as means for communicating information among distributed computers via a network or as communication means. The electronic mailing system enables efficient communication of information by designating a plurality of destinations at a time to transmit a mail. In conventional methods, for example, as described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 5-308376, destinations have been designated. Namely, the destinations of the electronic mail have been designated by directly specifying electronic mail users by using unique identifiers within the network or by creating a table for defining more recognizable aliases for the identifiers of the users and specifying one of the aliases.
In the above related art, to forward a received mail or a text appended within the mail to other persons from a recipient of the mail, GUI (graphical user interface) for specifying destinations has been used to designate the destination of the received mail. That is, a user of a mail client terminal opens a destination list for specifying destinations and selects a forwarding destination among members registered in the list. Such a destination specification method lacks in careful considerations for GUI in designating mail destinations to which a received mail should be forwarded, resulting in posing a problem in terms of user""s operability to forward mails.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method of forwarding a received electronic mail to one or more other persons through simple user""s operations.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an electronic mailing system which enables designation of the mail destination to which one of received mails should be forwarded, by intuitive operations.
To achieve the object, a method according to the present invention comprises the steps of: displaying a list of received electronic mails on a display screen; displaying indicators representing candidates of forwarding destinations of the electronic mail on the screen; and accepting selection of one or more electronic mails from said displayed list of received electronic mails and recognizing that said selected received electronic mail is overlapped on one of said indicators representing the candidates of forwarding destinations, and thereby forwarding the selected received electronic mail to a destination corresponding to said overlapped indicator.
The received electronic mails can be displayed in a form of a list of mail titles or a group of mail icons representative the received mails. Similarly, said candidates of the forwarding destinations can also be displayed in a form of a list of destination names or a group of destination icons.
According to the present invention, it is able to represent at least two destinations by one representative indicator so that a received mail can be forwarded to a plurality of destinations by overlapping the selected mail on the representative indicator on the screen.
Further, according to the present invention, it is able to automatically add a predefined routine text or a fixed form of text to the contents of the received electronic mail when the mail is forwarded to said selected destination.